


nothing's gonna change my world

by heartofwinterfell



Category: Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, and kinda a relationship study?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 14:10:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16348211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofwinterfell/pseuds/heartofwinterfell
Summary: Weaver, at a number of ages, experiencing the parameters of her reality shifting.





	nothing's gonna change my world

**Author's Note:**

> me to me: why did you spend so long on a fic for a movie that came out a year and a half ago with a fandom that barely exists?  
> me to me: ………….writing practice and an intense fixation on 60s and 70s culture?  
> me to me: fair enough, make sure to throw in a beatles song ya basic bitch.

_“Sounds of laughter shades of earth are ringing  
Through my open views inciting and inviting me” _

…

 

**_7 - 1952_ **

FDR was a dirty rotten communist and so was Mason Weaver’s daddy and everyone in the neighborhood knew it.

Mason’s older brother had to drag her through the back door because they’d face murder for getting drip-drip-dripping nose blood on mother’s new cream-colored carpet. Mason’s knee was missing skin. Her right incisor felt knocked loose too.

But Bobby Porter looked a whole lot worse, a self satisfied voice in the back of Mason’s mind told her.

She said so herself when grandpa asked her if she did a number on the other kid.

Only her grandpa’s face grew sour when she told him why she and Bobby came to blows. How could Mason know she was holding a match to a short fuse, so she sat in stunned silence as her grandpa exploded in a tirade against FDR, against communism, against the weak Americans favoring restraint, against her father and his own son.

There was a moment when her father drifted into the doorway of the kitchen at the back end of the deluge. He stood there, in a door frame in his home, and looked quietly ashamed. Ashamed of what - or who - Mason could not tell.

She slinked up to her room as her grandpa broke out the whiskey. Cross-legged on her bed, she tried not to pick the bandage wrapped around her knee. It would have been a nice distraction from the tears prickling in her eyes.

If her brother walked in and asked her why she was blubbering like a baby, Mason was not sure she could give him a clear answer.

When she asked later, searching for the nitty gritty details, her mother told her it was not dignified to talk about communism in polite company.

Her father told her it was best just to listen to what her mother said. Some things were better kept behind the storm clouds, obscured until the lightning struck.

Her brother said it all had something to do with freedom.

Mason hardly felt free, biting her lip and swallowing her tongue now when Bobby and the neighborhood gang came to wage war.

That was the summer with the birthday where her grandfather gifted her a second-hand camera. He told her to capture the truth with it - only the truth.

And though she was young, Mason remembered thinking: who’s truth?

_Yours?_

_Mine?_

 

...

 

**_28 - 1973_ **

In retrospect - if she had any time for retrospect on the run for her life - it was naive of Mason to ever think the world could no longer shock her.

She survived seventeen years of stifling suburbia. She thought she knew arrogance.

She survived friends throwing their lives against police lines. She thought she knew fear.

She survived two years embedded in Vietnam. She thought she knew horror.

This world - this prehistoric hell - ripped back the curtains and revealed Mason’s life for the pitiful existence it truly was. It was she who was arrogant, arrogant enough to believe she lived life with her eyes wide open. That she would never carry on the ignorance of her grandfather, the complacency of her mother, the meekness of her father.

The world was a spectrum of color and she had only seen primary.

The world was a triumphant symphony and she only cared to listen to the strings.

The world was seven circles of hell and Mason had dropped down to the core.

She thought she’d see hell if she ever got close enough to look in the King’s eyes. And they were dark and gargantuan and bottomless. But standing unmoving, across from one another, beast to beast, Mason saw the eyes were not lifeless. Mason thought she saw emotion there she saw in only the best of the people she knew. She saw emotions she could hardly put names to.

She told no one of her meeting with Kong. She worried it would hurt more than it would help, hurt to know how close he came to the walls.

But his eyes continued to haunt her as she stared at the fluorescent colors swirling across the sky.

“You believe we’ll get out of here, don’t you?” Mason asked Conrad, after too long a silence lapsed between them.

She watched him discreetly glance behind, back to apartment and the people inside. The unspoken question _“All of us?”_ sat uncomfortably between them. He finally answered, “Yes.”

“And you really believe that?” Mason had to ask because if she did not continue to be the person who asked the hard question, who was she? She had her world stripped away today _(or was it yesterday now?)_. She clung to her identity like her seven-year-old self clung to her camera, back when that was her whole person and every great thing she wanted to be.

“I have to. We have to.”

It occurred to Mason he meant not the group as a whole, but just them - Weaver and Conrad. Mason and James. Lin and Brooks and Slivko could fall apart, repeatedly and passionately as any human in their position was want to do. Weaver and Conrad were not afforded that luxury.

Years ago, maybe at twenty-four and certainly at seventeen, Mason’s life would be wrenched off its axis if a man like James Conrad gave her a passing glance. Even as a girl who prided herself in taking little stock in looks, Mason distantly recognized Conrad was the man who made a lover want to write sonnets.

Here, when they’re always moment to moment on the razor edge of danger, Mason had to see the man underneath the sculpted muscles and the piercing blue eyes. It made him real and it made her more real, too. She was not a distant planet to his burning sun. She was a photographer and he was a mercenary and they were now forever bonded together by the trauma of venturing into the terrifying unknown.

“We should find a place to sleep,” Conrad said, cutting through her thoughts. She could have been staring. She found the exhaustion washed away her ability to care.

When Mason nodded, Conrad slipped a gentle hand around her wrist. For a moment they both hesitated, eyes locked on his hand.

He had spent most of the day shepherding them all through the jungle - a guiding palm on Lin’s shoulder blades, a light elbow in Slivko’s side, a hundred tiny finger taps along her lower back. Not a man of words, he pushed them forward by the nicest kind of manhandling.

So why did this feel so intimate now? A sweaty hand clutching a dirt-smudged wrist?

Mason slowly pulled her wrist free, but she did not back away. Instead, she pressed their palms together and clasped their hands, fingers not intertwined but still holding fast.

It was a promise to never drift too far, to sleep side by side, heartbeat hearing heartbeat.

 

…

 

**_17 - 1962_ **

It was the summer of seventeen and Mason was coming close to unlocking the meaning of life.

Outside of boring old bland suburbia, into the trenches of dive bars and seedy clubs snuck into when the night turned neon, listening to bad British bands strum uptempo pop songs and drinking the dredges of body-heat warmed beers, Mason felt every sensation like a shot of freedom directly to her bloodstream. 

She had Michael now and the universe only unfurled wider.

Her mother thought they met at a church barbeque talking over home baked sugar cookies and sweet, sweet lemonade.

His lips always did taste sweet, sweet like nicotine and a little sour like the hard liquor he could order legally from the bars now. He was newly eighteen and he stood tall, so tall Mason was never sure how she’d catch up to him when he was striding with long legs into the future. She’d have to run.

Michael was the one who gave her the idea to go to New York. That was where she could take the kinds of photos that matter to people. That was where Mason Weaver had to be. After that, everything in her mind was skyscrapers and city blocks and black and white headshots and _Michael, Michael, Michael_.

And the idea, the grand New York idea, did not sound so crazy when Michael discussed it in a navy blue blazer and baby blue tie in her family’s dining room after he finished complimenting her mother’s mediocre cooking. He looked clean cut, looked like an All American, looked like the master of the universe if the universe was their small town and the country club agenda. Mason liked that she got to keep the image of him in a smooth leather jacket, knocking back straight vodka all to herself. If he could have both worlds, she could have both worlds too.

The worlds blurred beautifully together when he kissed her in the shadow of her house’s looming oak tree. It was sickenly clandestine, but all Mason could think is “I’m going to have this forever.”

She applied early to New York University

He received an early draft.

The universe that once grew with Michael arriving in her life only expanded when he left it. Their hours in the bars dwindled to hours in the park, linked fingers and little talk. When he shipped out, he promised he’d write. Mason promised too, but she wondered what contents would fill the letter, what words were important enough.

So she sent pictures instead. Photos of her house when the leaves changed, of the park after fresh rain, of the rough rumbles of homecoming football games. Her most-hated suburbia documented week after week for someone who must miss it desperately, for the only someone who she missed being a part of it.

She got into NYU. Those words felt important enough to write down in a letter.

It was the letter he never replied to.

Her mother cried crocodile tears when they received the news. Her father attempted to console her and fell flat. Her brother stayed at university and only called because he must want to stay somewhere he knew was safe.

Late that first night, one night after Michael, Mason darkly thought that she should have known this was exactly where their story was heading.

They delivered back most of the letters she wrote him, the pictures tucked carefully back in rip ravaged envelopes. Her first instinct was to burn them, but her hands shook too hard to strike the match. She placed them in a box she had marked in loopy girl cursive “Michael” and they joined torn ticket stubs and a bar coster and not much else.

She had never taken a picture of him. Why had she never taken a picture of him?

Going on eighteen and life remained a sphinx.

 

…

 

**_28 - 1973_ **

Mason could now divide her life between before Skull Island and after.

But if she signed the contract on the dotted line, the after became a whole lot more interesting, a whole lot more dangerous, a whole lot less in the public eye.

She handed it back to Brooks unsigned. Told him to give her the night. He granted her the time under the guise she needed to think over her options. What she needed was to drink over her options, toast to the dead and the living and the shredded ribbons of her career.

It was funny how she still cared about that, the magazine covers and the fading chance for a Pulitzer. Suddenly she was seventeen again clinging to her college acceptance letters because they seemed to be the only place to channel her grief. Because like that university track, her career held some sparkling promise of a future. She struggled to find the future hidden in the words of that contract.

Awful hard to read between one dotted line.

She tapped the rim of her glass just as a man slid into the seat beside her.

“Can I buy you this round?” Not simply a man, _her_ man.

“It’s already on my tab.”

“It’s 1975. The woman can buy.” Conrad’s grin was all teeth. Mason had little practice differentiate between his smiles, yet she could see the effort behind this one. She’d call it his _“I want to be a simple man flirting with a normal woman in a dimly lit bar”_ smile.

A normal woman would have a not-too-clever-but-clever-enough comeback. Mason just signalled to the bartender to make her order a double.

They both drained half a glass before either spoke again. “Brooks says you haven’t signed yet.”

Mason scoffed. “You were there when I gave him the contract back.”

“I gave you an hour to call a cab and go back.” Conrad finished the drink. The ice clacked against the glass.

“You lost that bet.” She knocked back the rest of her drink too, the third. Her brain felt fuzzy around the edges.

She knew he noticed, could tell in the way he said: “Which is why you should have let me buy you that drink.”

Mason straightened her spine, blinked to clear the film over her eyes, slid her glass a fraction in his direction. “We got time.”

The bartender poured another round. At that moment, the door burst open. A group of baby-faced kids filtered in, wearing their leather jackets and cheap cigarettes and the red neon wash of the lights outside like armor. Nothing could hurt them out there and they could be kings in here if they ordered with the right confidence.

The scene unfolded like a memory, one Mason wanted to escape into, if only for a little while. Not a single one of them knew anything about anything, not the leader of the merry band, not the dirty blonde breaking her curfew tucked under his arm.

They’d sleep blissfully easy tonight. Or maybe the girl would not, her heart racing too fast to keep up with new love. Mason felt for her, as she felt for her seventeen year old self and her self today.

Mason turned back to the bar. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Conrad watching the teenagers too. He looked less longing, more jealous, more disdainful. Mason wanted to grab his attention back. She tapped her fingers on his glass before returning to her own.

“To sleeping tonight!” Mason raised her glass. Conrad didn’t.

His eyes tracked the kids as they settled into a dark booth. They were constantly leaning into each other’s spaces, elbows overlapping elbows, foreheads brushing foreheads. They could plotting ways to change the world.

The disdain was gone from Conrad’s face. He instead looked struck with bitter sadness. “None of this is going to be worth it.”

Mason couldn’t help it - she scoffed. “Then why’d you sign?”

Conrad did not answer immediately. He stared down the liquid in his glass, contemplative. He kept his eyes down when he answered. “I knew if I didn’t, I’d never feel alive again.”

Again, Mason could not withhold her gut reaction - “Bullshit.”

That drew Conrad’s focus up. “Excuse me?”

“You sound like you’re giving a quote to the New York Times. And I should know.” Mason turned on the stool. She let her knees brush his thigh. He had those perfect blue eyes locked on her, but she did not feel pinned by his stare. She wanted him to feel pinned by hers. “Why’d you sign?”

Conrad did not have that put on look of consideration anymore. It was strange to see him genuinely search for words. Mason liked the look on him. She wondered, perhaps at the wrong moment, if she’d ever stop finding new things to like about him.

“My job has always been finding people. I think you can guess why.” Her mind flashed to the balcony and his father’s lighter. “And it mattered, it would still matter if I went back to it. But this, joining Monarch...it feels like what I’ve always done, but... _more_ , somehow. I won’t just be finding people. I’ll be finding...truth.” Conrad looked down, sheepish almost. “I apologize, that last part still sounded rather cliche.”  
  
“My grandpa used to say the truth is always worth finding,” Mason murmured.  
  
“He must have liked your photography then.” The comment was a touch heartfelt, wholly innocuous. Mason wanted to live inside its happy assumption, but she couldn’t stomach the lie.  
  
“No, I think he would have hated it.”

There would not be another round of drinks and it was about time for Mason to decide what she wanted.

She wanted to pass out in her cheap motel bed and never wake up. She wanted to drag Conrad back with her and not sleep until sunrise. She wanted to be seventeen, or twenty-four, or twenty-eight again in a world correctly ordered. She wanted to remember it all, but through a window, at a distance. She wanted something true.

Mason signed the contract the next morning.

 

…

 

**_24 - 1969_ **

These were the days of rage. 

Her country’s rage and her own, overboiling in the pot, spilling over and spilling fast. She found herself in a ramshackle house upstate, vermin in the walls and mold in the basement, heat bills long overdue, and her second-hand camera remained the nicest thing she owned. She took it everywhere, pointer finger always on the trigger. She snapped pictures of her friends handing out pamphlets, students demonstrating on campus, the crowds in the streets on their trips to the bigger cities.

Every action felt like it meant something. Every photo felt like it could change the tides. Only the tide kept flowing one direction and they kept swimming against it and Mason started growing weary of constantly treading water, always stuck in the same place.

And then the pressure began pushing at her back, trying to redirect her down a rocky stream Mason never asked to travel down.

These were the days of fear, too.

She had a friend and housemate in Lily now, but Lily never knew when to stop yelling and she had to be the voice that carried above the rest. She got arrested in the early summer for violent demonstration. The violence was two sided - she came back to the house with a shattered wrist and bruised ribs. She packed her ratty duffel a day later and shipped off back home.

She had a friend and housemate in Alister too, Alister with his trace Irish accent and ruddy cheeks and cheerful voice that spewed profanity and Lenin politics. He stayed civilly disobedient at protests, but violently disobedient in the bars. A brawl ended in two full glass of foaming beer shattered over his head. The hospital bills alone made it so he could not even pay their meager rent. Another bag packed.

She had a new Michael, same name and same towering height. But he was made of softer stuff, with wispy blonde hair and large-framed glasses that slid off his nose and stick thin limbs that’d get reduced to dust if he ever stumbled into a fight. The only thing not soft about him were his politics, hard lined and unforgiving. He stocked the fourth hand books in their fire hazard house and he read them all cover to cover, twice.

And his ideas fueled Mark and Ryan’s flames, housemates five and six, the revolutionaries of one mind. When Mason moved in during the fall of ‘67, fresh out of college, fresh out of money, and with a phobia of moving back to her parents’ house, Mark and Ryan were still organizing protests on their college campus.

Fall of ‘69 and Mark and Ryan were talking about building bombs.

And Mason was scared, more scared than she had been getting rocks thrown at her by Bobby Porter or having army men at her door wanting to talk about the first Michael or spending four years in New York City with very few people to call on.

Late at night, she’d sneak downstairs and spend an hour with the phone receiver clutched in her hand, held fast against her ear, but she could never bring herself to dial her parents’ number. After one roaring fight, she called her brother with shaking fingers. She hung up as soon as she heard his sleep-laced voice mumble hello.

Because she still wanted to make a difference, she still wanted to bring the Michaels home and protect the Lilys and Alisters from any more beatings and prove the grandpas wrong, even if they’ve long since been in their grave.

But why did it have to ramp up to this, young adults with their paperthin ideas amassing the materials to build a bomb.

A letter came along as her saving grace - an ironic twist in fate. Between navigating through landmines in her own house and trying to keep Michael from caving to Mark and Ryan, Mason had forgotten she submitted photos to a handful of magazines and newspapers early in the summer, when the temperatures were hot but the tempers were not, not yet.

A magazine wanted to pay for a photo, maybe two. They asked if she wanted to come in and talk about a freelance position. They were looking for someone young, a person with a fresh perspective, a person willing to do anything.

Was Mason Weaver a person willing to do anything?

She read the letter over, memorized every word while sitting cross-legged on her grimy couch in her decrepit house, ten feet away from two young men pouring over floor plans of a well-visited bank.

Mason could be willing to do anything, if anything was not this.

She’d talk to Michael, she’d try to convince him to find an out, too. Then she was packing a bag.

 

…

 

**_29 - 1974_ **

They had their backs against the cave wall and Mason’s thudding heartbeat told her she was alive, but for how much longer?

“Where are Brooks and Lin?”

Mason sunk to the floor. The wall was slick against her back, but she was already soaked to the bone. That tended to happen when a person jumped off the perilous edge of a waterfall. She did that so much more now, leaping off cliffs without glancing at what was below.

Conrad always took those leaps alongside her, just as he was alongside her now, sitting down next to her shoulder to shoulder. All her greatest fears now boiled down to not having him this close, catching his breath with her, hearts beating the same dangerous rate, alive but for how much longer.

“Are you ever scared,” Mason started, words labored between heavy pants, “are you ever worried people like Colonel Packard will find these places?”

That fear too boiled down to losing him. There were the nightmares where the events twisted and changed to have Packard decide the pull the trigger when Conrad stepped in front of her. There were the worst-case scenario daydreams she fell down like a rabbit hole, taking her from images of government agents tracking them to an island to the agents returning with helicopters and firepower to Mason losing Conrad in the crossfire.

It was never the monsters that took him away from her and they’ve faced their fair share of towering terrors with razor blade beaks and pin sharp talons and indestructible scales. Outside their hiding place, Mason could hear the distant sound of beating wings and cawing battle cries.

They scared her, yes, with their mindless thirst to kill.

Packard, long dead and gone, scared her more.

Glancing over, Mason saw Conrad turning over her question in his mind. In the spaces between running for their lives and handing over the reports Brooks and Lin wanted, Conrad spent the year growing more contemplative. And in those quieter spaces, Mason liked thinking it was a slow side effect of her.

“Everyone will have to find out about these places one day,” Conrad finally answered. “But yes, I’ll always hope it will not be because people like Packard are requesting troops to wage a war.”

“Or to come collect any of these things to be used as weapons.” Atomic bombs, napalm, prehistoric birds and apes of prey. The list of lethal weapons was written on infinite paper.

“And we’ll remain the first defense to stop them,” Conrad said, as though it were that simple. Mason once thought that vocal tick came from a surprising well of optimism Conrad had. She knew well enough now it came from his own strain of single-mindedness. If contracted for a job, Conrad completed it, no exception.

Mason hoped that began rubbing off on her, if she did not possess that grit already.

The screeching and beating outside sounded closer. Mason could see Conrad already working on a plan. He slipped his hand into the side of his pack and came back with something clutched in his fist. Mason knew what it was before the grip unfurled.

“It may not work,” Conrad said, voice low, barely audible over the cacophony outside. He was afraid; she was, too. Just not enough to stop launching off the cliff’s edge.

Conrad stood, moving along the wall to the lip of the cave. Mason stayed at his side, hardly an inch behind him. He turned back, eyes locking with hers.

“If we get out of this alive, I’m going to kiss you, Mason Weaver.”

He pulled the pin out of the grenade.

 

…

 

**_26 - 1971_ **

Her mother said she was finally out of her mind. For all she knew, Mason could be disowned now. The next time she stepped foot on US soil, perhaps a family would not be waiting for her. That made Mason all the more confident in her decision.

If she could stir up her mother’s emotions to a fever pitch, she could stir up anyone’s. And she could do it _(almost)_ legally, with her camera in hand.

But there were hard days and there were harder nights.

Sometimes the heat got to her, when she wore her tank tops like a second skin and her hair matted in chunks to the back of her neck and the water in her canteen seemed to evaporate before touching her lips.

Most other times, though, the people did. She’d laugh and joked with the soldiers in camps that could be gone hours after she left. She jotted down names that could appear on a very different list within the week. She’d never see any of them again, for one reason or a darker other, and all she’d have left of them was the black and white detail of their smile and their grip on a gun.

They haunted her camera, they haunted her dreams. And when she woke up to the beating of helicopter propellers or the crackle of machine gun fire, she remembered she had to fear for herself too.

She thought of her scared self at twenty-four, the late nights by the house phone wondering if she should cry for help by calling home. Here, imbedded, she did not have that luxury of reassurance, the comforting knowledge that if she had the courage to dial the number, her parents would be on the other end of the line.

But even on the roughest nights, when the noise never let up, Mason had no desire to leave. The tides had to be changing, the war machine had to have their backs against the wall.

Mason kept snapping, kept developing, kept sending the photos back overseas. She believed any day now, any day she’d ship out and the entire army would follow her back.

She was twenty-six and life could still be lived with optimism.

But she shook hands with captains and colonels after they stood proudly beside their men and wondered. She stood to the side and watched them scream for resilience in their troops, raised her camera to capture it. And she’d pause, eye peering through the lens, thinking she’d be freezing a moment in time that may never actually have an end. A voice started creeping up on her, whispering after all her most hopeful refrains.

_The war is almost over._

_Is it?_

_Our military will admit defeat._

_Have they ever?_

 

…

 

**_30 - 1977_ **

“You should marry me.”

His hand was tangled in her hair, twisting and tugging but never rough. It reminded her it was getting too long. He was too, it curled at the base of his neck. She’d never tell him to cut it, though.

“I should?”

Her leg was tangled over his, slotted perfectly in the space between. Millimeters apart felt like too wide a space between them now. She knew the definition of the word co-dependence, but she hadn’t felt its meaning this strongly since seventeen. She liked the feeling better here, craved it like a high. And it never tasted toxic.

“If only to make it less suspicious that we travel everywhere together, constantly.”

The room was disgusting, duvet dusty and sheets paper thin. The blinds had too much space between the slots. Anyone could peer in and see them, sweaty and bare and drenched in too much moonlight and the dull street lamp glow. Mason dared someone to try. They were in a dangerous area and there was a thrill that came with knowing they were the scariest people for miles.

“Maybe I like all these motel people thinking you’re my mistress.”

People knew when they saw them, in open air markets and in seedy bars. They never touched in public, an unspoken rule since it all began, but people knew. Vendors asked if he wanted to buy her glass diamonds and drunken women told her to keep an eye on him. Someone could swipe him up the second she stopped looking. Only she never stopped looking.

“Say yes, Weaver.”

Whispered in her hair, breath ghosting on her cheek.

“I don’t think this is how my mother dreamed my engagement would go.”

She never had been one of the little girls who used white pillowcases as veils and picked wildflowers outside to construct a bouquet. And she grew up with a lingering suspicion her mother thought marriage was the thing that would calm her down, iron out the fault lines. It made her quietly resent the institution in her teenage years before she forgot it all together when she agreed to a long-term relationship with anti-war journalism. Maybe somewhere along the way, she stopped believing marriage could ever be in the cards for her.

“Have you ever been one to do anything the normal way?”

He voiced her thoughts; he always did. Knew her well enough to pose the question like the highest of compliments punctuated by a feather light kiss to the top of her head, just lasting enough for her to feel his smile.

“No...but I think having a husband will be the most normal thing about me.”

A marriage normal on paper, never normal in practice. He was never known for doing anything the normal way either. She wondered if he experienced the same long road to thinking he’d never get married, if he resolved himself to be alone because it was most compatible with the life he liked to live.

“Is that a yes?”

But it was not compatible anymore, was it? Being alone. She’d never last the day, either in good weather or in bad, if he was not with her. She knew that long before he kissed her in a freshly founded graveyard, smoke and blood swirling around them.

Mason slipped her hand into his and intertwined their fingers. Imagining matching rings there stopped seeming crazy. “Only if this isn’t also you posing our retirement.”

Conrad smiled. “Never.”

 

…

 

**_32 - 1979_ **

Is life a series of random events or a set of carefully laid plans?

Mason could sit down at a desk and write out her life story, draw invisible red-string lines between the major events of thirty-four years and see a reason that she ended up the person that she was in the place where she is.

She could also interrogate it all, rip apart the strings. Why Michael’s death? Why violent protests? Why Kong? What control did she have over any of the deaths and the wars and the freaks of nature?

Mason made choices. The universe made choices back. At times, everything seemed infuriatingly random; at others, as strategic as a chess game.

Conrad made choices too, choices that improbably, impossibly, undoubtedly led him to her. When she thinks about that, the universe starts feeling a little smaller, a little more manageable. She remembered wanting her world to be so big once, because big meant she could never be trapped in one place for too long.

Mason liked to think she had it both ways now. She had a universe wider and scarier than ninety-nine percent of people in the world. And she had love, perhaps no more special or extraordinary than a love any two people could share, but one that tethered her to a place she could retreat to when everything felt too random and chaotic.

It was safe. Free. True.

…

  
_“Limitless undying love which shines around me like a_  
 _million suns, it calls me on and on_  
 _Across the universe”_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Skull Island is an under appreciated work of Cinema and you can quote me on that.


End file.
